“He is crouching on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth.”
An excerpt from For the Glory
Weihsien, Shandong Provence, China.
1944
He is crouching on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth. His upper body is thrust slightly forward and his arms are bent at the elbow. His left leg is planted ahead of the right, the heels of both raised slightly in preparation for a springy launch.
Exactly two decades earlier, he won his Olympic title in the hot, shallow bowl of Paris’ Colombes Stadium. Afterward, the crowd in the yellow-painted grandstands gave him the longest and loudest ovation of those Games. What inspired them was not only his roaring performance, but also the element of sacrificial romance wound into his personal story, which unfolded in front of them like the plot of some thunderous novel.
Now, trapped in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp, the internees have teemed out of the low dormitories and the camp’s bell tower to line the route of the makeshift course to see Eric Liddell again. Even the guards in the watchtowers peer down eagerly at the scene.
In Paris, Liddell ran on a track of crimson cinder. In Weihsien, he will compete along dusty pathways, which the prisoners have named to remind them nostalgically of far-away home: Main Street, Sunset Boulevard, Tin Pan Alley.
Liddell claimed his gold medal in a snow-white singlet, his country’s flag across his chest. Here he wears a shirt cut from patterned kitchen curtains, baggy khaki shorts, which are grubby and drop to the k nee, and a pair of gray canvas “spikes,” almost identical to those he’d used during the Olympics.
As surreal as it seems, “Sports Days’ such as this one are an established feature of the camp. For the internees, it is a way of forgetting — for a few hours at least — the reality of incarceration; a prisoner wistfully calls each of these days “a speck of glitter amid the dull monotony.”
Even though he is over 40 years old, practically bald and pitifully thin, Liddell is the marquee attraction. Those who don’t run want to watch him. Those who do want to beat him.
Though spread over 60,000 square miles, the coastal Provence of Shandong, tucked into the eastern edge of China’s north plain, looks miniscule on maps of that immense country. Weihsien is barely a pencil dot within Shandong. And the camp itself is merely a speck within that — a roll of land of approximately three acres, roughly the size of two football pitches. Caught in both the vastness of China and also the grim mechanism of the Second World War, which seems without respite let alone end, the internees had begun to think of themselves as forsaken.
Until the Red Cross at last got food parcels to them in July, there were those who feared the slow, slow death of starvation. Weight fell off everyone. Some lost a stone or two, including Liddell, who dropped from 160 pounds to around 130. Others, noticeably corpulent on entering Weihsien, shed five or more stones and looked like lost souls in worn clothes. Morale sagged, a black depression ringing the camp as high as its walls.
Those parcels meant life.
While hunger stalked the camp, no one had the fuel or the inclination to run. The race is a celebration, allowing the internees to express their relief at finally being fed.
Liddell shouldn’t be running in it.
Ever since late spring cum early summer he’s felt weary and strangely disconnected. His walk has slowed. His speech has slowed too. He’s begun to do things ponderously and is sleeping only fitfully, the tiredness burrowing into his bones. He is stoop-shouldered. Mild dizzy spells cloud some of his days. Sometimes his vision is blurred. Though desperately sick, he casually dismisses his symptoms as “nothing to worry about,” blaming them on overwork.
Throughout the 18 months he’s already spent in Weihsien, Liddell has been a reassuring presence, always representing hope. He has toiled as if attempting to prove that perpetual motion is actually possible. He rises before dawn and labors until curfew at 10pm. Liddell is always doing something; and always doing it for others rather than for himself. He scrabbles for coal, which he carries in metal pails. He chops wood and totes bulky flour sacks. He cooks in the kitchens. He cleans and sweeps. He repairs whatever needs fixing. He teaches science to the children and teenagers of the camp and coaches them in sport too. He counsels and consoles the adults, who bring him their worries. Every Sunday he preaches in the church. Even when he works the hardest, Liddell still apologizes for not working hard enough.
The internees are so accustomed to his industriousness that no one pays much attention to it anymore; familiarity has allowed the camp to take both it and him a little for granted.
Since Liddell first become public property — always walking in the arc-light of fame — wherever he went and whatever he did or had once done was brightly illuminated and became common knowledge. The son of Scots missionaries born, shortly after the 20th century began, in the portof Tientsin. The sprinter whose locomotive speed inspired newspapers to call him The Flying Scotsman. The devout Christian who preached in congressional churches and meeting hallsabout scripture, temperance, morality and Sunday observance. The Olympic Champion who abandoned the track for the sake of his religious calling in China. The husband who booked boat passages for his pregnant wife and two infant daughters to enable them to escape the torment he was enduring in Weihsien. The father who had never met his third child, born without him at her bedside. The friend and colleague, so humbly modest, who treated everyone equally.
The internees assume nothing will harm such a good man; especially someone who is giving so much to them. And none of them has registered his deteriorating physical condition because he and everyone else look too much alike to make his illness conspicuous.
Anyone else would find an excuse not to race. Liddell, however, doesn’t have it in him to back out. He is too conscientious. The camp expects him to compete, and he won’t let them down, however much the effort drains him and however shaky his legs feel. He is playing along with his role as Weihsien’s breezy optimist, a front concealing his distress. Every few weeks he merely slits a new notch-hole into the leather of his black belt and then pulls it tightly around his ever-shrinking waistline.
Liddell makes only one concession. Previously he has been scrupulously fair about leveling the field. He’s always started several yards behind the other runners, giving them an outside chance of beating him. This time there is no such handicap for him; that alone should alert everyone to the fact he is ailing.
Liddell says nothing about it. Instead, he takes his place, without pause or protest, in a pack of a dozen other runners, his eyes fixed on nothing but the narrow strip of land that constitutes the front straight.
The starter climbs on to an upturned packing crate, holding a white handkerchief aloft in his right hand. And then he barks out the three words Liddell has heard countless times in countless places:
Ready. . . Set . . . Go.
***
Weifang, Shandong Provence, China.
Present Day
He is waiting for me at the main gate on Guang-Wen Street.
He is dressed smartly and formally: white shirt, dark tie and an even darker suit, the lapels wide and well cut. He looks like someone about to make a speech or take a business meeting.
His blonde hair is impeccably combed back, revealing high widow’s peaks. There’s the beginning of a smile on his slender lips, as if he knows a secret the rest of us don’t and is about to share it. Barely a wrinkle or a crease blemishes his pale skin, and his eyes are brightly alert. He is a handsome, eager fellow, still blazing with life.
On this warm, spring morning, I am looking directly into Eric Liddell’s face.
He’s preserved in his absolute pomp, his photograph pressed on to a big square of metal. It is attached to an iron pole as tall as a lamp post. This is Communist homage to a Christian, a man China regards with paternal pride as its first Olympic Champion. In Chinese eyes, he is a true son of their country; he belongs to no one else.
More than 70 years have passed since Liddell came here. He’s never gone home. He’s never grown old.
The place he knew as Weihsien is now called Weifang, the landscape unimaginably different. Liddell arrived on a flat-bed truck. He saw nothing but a huge checker-board of field-crops stretching to the black line of the horizon. Narrow dirt roads, along which horse drawn carts rattled on wooden wheels, linked one flyspeck village to another. Each was primitively rural.
I arrived on the sleek-nosed G-train from Beijing, a distance of 300 miles covered in three rushing hours. What I saw were power stations with soot-lipped cooling towers, acres of coal spread around them like an oil slick, and the blackened, belching chimneys of factories. The city that needs this industrial muscle is the epitome of skyscraper modernity, a gleaming example of the new China built out of concrete and glass, steel and neon. Skeletal cranes are everywhere, always creating something taller than before. These structures climb into a sky smothered in smog, the sun glimpsed as only a shadowed shape behind it.
Guang-Wen Street is the bridge between this era and Liddell’s.
When he arrived in 1943, the locals, living as though Time had stopped a century before, parked handheld barrows on whichever pitch suited them and bartered over home-grown vegetables, bolts of cloth and tin pots and plates. Today’s traders, setting up canvas stalls, sell ironmongery and replica sports shirts, framed watercolors and tapestries, electrical gadgetry and a miscellany of ornamental kitsch. At one end of Guang-Wen Street is an office high-rise with tinted windows. At the other is the People’s Hospital, its facade whiter than a doctor’s house coat.
What counts, however, is the plot of biscuit-brown land between them. Number Two Middle School is a motley assortment of low, dull structures, which look anachronistic and architecturally out of kilter with everything nearby.
The camp once stood here.
The buildings familiar to Liddell were bulldozed long ago. Gone is a whitewashed church. Gone is the bell tower and the rows of dormitories. Gone also are the watchtowers with arrow-slit widows and conical tops, like a Chinese peasant’s hat.
The Japanese called it a “Civilian Internment Center,” a euphemism offering the flimsiest camouflage to the harsh truth. A united nations of men, women and children were prisoners alongside Liddell rather than comfy guests of the Emperor Hirohito. There were Americans and Australians, South Americans and South Africans, Russians and Greeks, Dutch and Belgians and British, Scandinavians and Swiss and Filipinos. Among the nationalities were disparate stratas of society: merchant bankers, entrepreneurs, boardroom businessmen, solicitors, architects, teachers and government officials. There were also drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and thieves, who coexisted beside monks and nuns and missionaries, such as Liddell.
Weihsien housed over 2,100 internees during a period of two and a half years. At its terrible zenith, between 1,600 and 1,800were shut into it at once.
The place already had a past. It had previously been an American Presbyterian Mission. Born there was the Nobel laureate Pearl S Buck, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Good Earth, which made China less mysterious to the millions who read it in the 1930s. Henry Luce, founder of Time and father of its subsequent empire, lived within the compound as a boy. The Chinese had christened it Le Dao Yuan –Courtyard of the Happy Way. The Japanese left the phrase chiseled across the lintel of the grand entrance, as though mocking those forced to pass beneath it. Awaiting them to deter disobedience or escape were armed guards, some with Alsatian dogs on chain leads, and an electric fence. A trench, dug six feet deep, came next.
A man’s labor can become his identity; Liddell testifies to that. Before internment, he worked in perilous outposts in China, dodging bullets and shells and always wary of the knife-blade. After it, he dedicated himself to everyone around him, as though it was his responsibility alone to imbue the hardships, degradations, and monotony of life there with a proper purpose and make the long days bearable.
The short history of the camp emphasizes the impossibility of Liddell’s task. In the beginning, it was filthy and insanitary, the pathways strewn with debris and the living quarters squalid. The claustrophobic conditions brought predictable consequences. There were verbal squabbles, sometimes flaring in physical fights, over the meager portions at mealtimes and also the question of who was in front of whom in the queue to receive them. There were disagreements, also frequently violent, over privacy and personal habits and hygiene as well as perceived idleness, selfishness and pilfering.
Liddell was different. He overlooked the imperfections of character that beset even the best of us, doing so with a gentlemanly charm.
With infinite patience, he also gave special attention to the young, who affectionately called him “Uncle Eric.” He played chess with them. He built model boats for them. He fizzed with ideas, also arranging entertainments and sport, particularly softball and baseball which were staged on a miniature diamond bare of grass.
Skeptical questions are always going to be asked when someone is portrayed without apparent faults and also as the possessor of standards which appear so idealized and far-fetched to the rest of us. Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honorable to be true, as if those who knew him were either misremembering or consciously mythologising. Not so. The evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed as easily as that. Amid the myriad moral dilemmas in Weihsien, Liddell’s forbearance was remarkable. No one could ever recall a minute act of envy, pettiness, hubris or self-aggrandisementfrom him. He bad-mouthed nobody. He didn’t bicker.He lived daily by the most unselfish credo, which was to help others practically and emotionally.
Liddell became the camp’s conscience without ever being pious, sanctimonious or judgmental. He forced his religion on no one. He didn’t expect others to share his beliefs, let alone live up to them. In his church sermons, and also during weekly scripture classes, Liddell didn’t preach grandiloquently. He did so conversationally, as if chatting over a picket fence, and those who heard him thought this gave his messages a solemn power that the louder, look-at-me sermonisers could never achieve. “You came away from his meetings as if you’d been given a dose of goodness,” said a member of the camp congregation. “Everyone regarded him as a friend,” said another, giving voice to the unanimous verdict. Someone else nonetheless saw an enigmatic side to him amid all this subjugation of the self. Aware of how ably he disguised his own feelings, she thought him “elusive.” She pondered what Liddell was really “thinking about when he wasn’t speaking,” which implies how much anguish he bottled up and hid away to serve everyone else’s needs.
One internee spoke about Liddell as though Chaucer’s selfless and chivalrous “Verray Parfit Gentil Knight” had been made flesh. “You knew you were in the presence of someone so thoroughly pure,” he explained. A second put it better, saying simply, as if Liddell was only a step or two from beatification: “It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint. He came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”
In his own way he proved that heroism in war exists beyond churned up battlefields. His heroism was to be utterly forgiving in the most unforgiving of circumstances.
***
Of course, most of the world sees a different Eric Liddell. It frames him running across a screen, the composer Vangelis’ synthesized soundtrack accompanying every stride. The images, the music, the man and what he achieved in the Olympics in 1924 are familiar to us because cinema made them so.
We know that Liddell, then a 22 year-old Edinburgh University student and already one of the fastest sprinters in the world, believed so strongly in the sanctity of the Sabbath that he sacrificed his chance to win the 100 meters. We know the early heats of that event were staged on a Sunday. We know that Liddell refused to run in them, leaving a gap that his British contemporary Harold Abrahams exploited. We know that Liddell resisted intense pressure — from the public, from his fellow Olympians and from the British Olympic Association — to betray his conscience and change his mind about Sunday competition. We know that he entered the 400 meters, a distance he’d competed in only ten times before. And we know that, against formidable odds and despite the predictions of gloomy naysayers, he won it with glorious ease.
We know all this because the film Chariots of Fire told us so and took four Oscars as a consequence in 1982, including Best Picture.
In it Liddell claims gold in super-slow-motion; he’s then chaired off in front of a raucous crowd. The story has its perfect full stop — tidy and neat and also clinching evidence that cinema does what it must to fulfill its principle purpose, which is to entertain. To achieve it the first casualty is always historical fact. Fictional contrivances shape anew what actually happened to create a compelling drama. Most of us are smart enough to realize that film-makers who pick history as their subject tinker with the veracity of it. But our perception of an event or of a person still becomes inextricably bound to the image presented to us. So it is with Chariots of Fire. So it is with Liddell. We’ve ceased to see him. We see instead the actor Ian Charleson, who portrayed him so compassionately.
The best portrayals of sport are never about the sport itself, but rather the human condition in pursuit of its glories, which is why you can excuse Chariots of Fire its intentional inaccuracies. It captures the inherent decency of Liddell. He is much more fascinating and likable than the relentlessly driven Abrahams, presented as his implacably bitter rival to ratchet up the drama.
Liddell was never fixated on anyone else’s form the way Abrahams became fixated about his. Losing in Paris would have mortified Abrahams, probably destructively, because he believed his status was dependent on his running. Liddell was no less competitive. But he saw Abrahams as an adversary rather than the enemy; and he considered athletics as an addendum to his life rather than his sole reason for living it.
Indeed, there are countless anecdotes of his sportsmanship toward fellow competitors, which sound a bit like the brightest boy in class allowing everyone else to copy his homework. In competition he’d lend his trowel, used to dig starting holes, to other runners who lacked one. He once offered to give up the precious inside lane on the track, swopping it with the runner drawn unfavorably on the outside. On a horribly cold afternoon he gave his royal blue university blazer to a rival, freezing in only a singlet and shorts — even though it meant shivering himself. On another occasion he noticed the growing discomfort of an Indian student, utterly ignored before an event. He interrupted his own preparations to seek him out; their conversation went on until the starter called them both to the line. This was typical of Liddell. He’d engage anyone he thought was nervous or uncertain and listen conscientiously even whenever the inexperienced sought advice on a technical aspect of sprinting. He’d share what he knew before the bang of the pistol pitted them against each other. In the dash to the tape, however, Liddell suspended friendship. He was fearsomely focussed, the empathy he instinctively felt for others never slackening his desire to beat them.
He toiled to become the fastest, testing himself in all sorts of ways. Through hilly Edinburgh he’d audaciously race against corporation busses to spice up his training, challenging the driver from the pavement. If a bus beat him to a traffic light, Liddell would reproach himself for coming second.
Obscure one moment and a feared title contender the next, he lit up athletics like flash of sheet-lightning, Liddell did it despite the fact he was so stylistically unconventional as to be a freak.
We prefer our sporting heroes to possess esthetic as well as athletic prowess. We want to see poetry and hear the song of the body in their movements, the impeccable coordination of mind and eye and limb that enables the fan in the stand to make this specific claim: that watching sport is akin to watching one of the fine arts. The obvious allusion is to dance — usually ballet. That comparison has been made so often, consequently becoming a cliché. But it never invalidates the legitimacy of the argument — even if those unappreciative of sport struggle to understand the idea. The best dancers are performing athletes and vice versa. And what always stirs us, viscerally, is the beauty that exists within them. Think of Tiger Woods driving off the tee at his finest. Think of Jim Brown on a slalom run, devouring rushing yards. Think of Ted Williams holding his pose, eyes following the arc and drop of the ball after another home-run has cracked off his bat. Think of Muhammad Ali doing his shuffle.
Sometimes, though, the ugly duckling wins.
Liddell didn’t look like a sprinter before a race started. He was only 5ft 9, which was considered slightly too short for the distances he ran. In an 11 stone frame, his bull-chest was heavy and his legs were short and thin.
He looked even less like a sprinter when a race got underway.
There was an ungainly frenzy about him. Liddell swayed, rocking like an overloaded express train, and he threw his head well back, as if studying the sky rather than the track. In Scottish colloquialism, this “heid back” approach became his signature flourish. His arms pumped away furiously and his knee-lift was extravagantly high, like a pantomime horse. The New York Times thought Liddell “seemed to do everything wrong.” In one cartoon the Daily Mail’s celebrated caricaturist Tom Webster sketched Liddell as if he was a rubber contortionist. His body is shaped into a capital S, his head tilted so far backward that it is almost touching his waist and he can see only where he’d been and not where he is going. The caption reads: “Mr. Liddell wins his race by several yards. He could never win by a head because he holds it back too far.” In another cartoon Webster nonetheless highlighted that means, however peculiar, could always be justified by a triumphant end. Liddell, he said, ran a furlong at Stamford Bridge in what seemed to be “three or four seconds’ and “created a draft that was felt at Wimbledon.” That draft would have swept all the way through the decade and into another Olympics — if he had decided to carry on running.
Liddell broke away from athletics at the peak of his flight. Sportsmen who reach the summit of their sport usually try to cling on there until their fingernails bleed. Well in advance of the Olympics, Liddell had talked of his intention to abdicate gracefully because his real calling was elsewhere. For most of us that would be an easy vow to make before we became somebody — and an even easier one to break after the blandishments and the fancy trimmings of fame seduced us. Liddell never let it happen to him. He had promises to keep. That he kept them then and also subsequently is testament to exceptionally rare qualities in an exceptionally rare individual. Overnight Liddell could have become one of the richest of “amateur” sportsmen. But he wouldn’t accept offers to write newspaper columns or make public speeches for cash. He wouldn’t say yes to prestigious teaching sinecures, refusing the benefits of a smart address and a high salary. He wouldn’t endorse products. He wouldn’t be flattered into business or banking either. He made only trivial concessions to his celebrity. He allowed his portrait to be painted. He let a gardener name a gladiolus in his honor at the Royal Horticultural Show. In everything else Liddell followed his conscience, choosing to do what was right because to do anything else, he felt, would sully the gift God had given him to run fast.
Chariots of Fire didn’t have the room to explain any of this. Nor could it expand on what came afterward for him. So his final two decades were concertinaed into two sentences — white lettering on a black background. Reading it, rather than having it spoken to you, somehow makes the message more powerful still. It is as bleak as the inscription on a tombstone.
ERIC LIDDELL, MISSIONARY, DIED IN OCCUPIED CHINA ATTHE END OF WORLD II. ALL OF SCOTLAND MOURNED.
***
That such a gentle man died such an ungentle death here hardly seems possible. At least not today. Spring has dressed everything in blush pink and peach blossom, the flame-red of early hibiscus and also wisteria, which is a swell of livid, lake-purple. Sprays of dense bloom waterfall from the branches of trees, run across gables and guttering, fences and trellising. Alive with greenery, lightly drowning the pale paths in leaf shadow, the bigger trees remind me that I am walking exactly where others, including Eric Liddell, walked decades before. With smaller trunks and spindlier branches, these trees bore mute witness to Weihsien’s woes.
The Chinese, wanting no one to forget them, have created a museum. The exhibits, preserved in a sepulchral half-light, are mostly enlarged black and white photographs, watercolors and pencil drawings fastened behind glass. Liddell has a commemorative corner to himself. I see him winning a race shortly before the Olympics, his head back as always and his eyes half-closed. I see him on his wedding day, super-smart in morning coat and winged collar. I see the short wooden cross carved for his grave, obscured by overgrown foliage.
The earth that held him during the war holds him still; though no one has known precisely where for over half a century because the graveyard, located in the Japanese quarters, was cleared and then built over during the period when Shandong Provence became more difficult to reach for the non-Chinese. No one can identify the date when his cross was removed and the clearance began either. So, instead of a grave, Liddell now has a monument — an enormous slab of rose granite shipped from the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides.
Standing in front of that monument, I am aware of what no photograph of it can ever convey: its hulking size — seven feet high and two and a half feet across; how age has weathered it; how the heat of the day warms the granite; how its edge, left deliberately rough and uneven, feels against my hand.
One of my favorite stories about Liddell is also the first ever told about him. He was supposed to have been christened Henry Eric until a family friend stopped his father on the way to register the birth and asked what “the wee man” was going to be called. The friend gently pointed out that the initials — H.E.L. — were scarcely appropriate for a missionary’s offspring, which is why his Christian names were reversed. This comes back to me as I stare at his name. The sun, at last burning a hole through the smog, appears with impeccable timing and makes the gold lettering glow.
The accompanying inscriptions include the quotation from Isaiah, chapter 40, verse one, that Chariotsof Fire slipped into its script to cap a pivotal scene: “They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not be faint.” A few, scant lines of biography cover the cardinal points of his 43 years and 37 days: his birth, his Olympic success, his death. The phrase “fraternal virtues’ acknowledges his missionary service.
“Fraternal virtues’ isn’t the half of it. Everything you need to know about the heart Liddell had — and what he did with it — is contained in one fact.
Every morning in Weihsien, while the camp still slept, he lit a peanut oil lamp in the darkness and prayed for an hour. Every night, after studyingthe Bible, he prayed again. He did not discriminate. He prayed for everyone; even for his Japanese guards.
How do you pay proper respect to a man as humane as that; a man, moreover, who strove every day for perfection in thought, as well as deed, and whose death engulfed those who knew him in a sadness almost too deep for words? I do the best I can. I place a cellophane wrapped spray of flowers — gold tiger lilies, white carnations, orange gerbera — on the wide plinth of this grand tower of granite.
When I turn toward the noise and color of the Guang-Wen Street again, I am convinced of one thing above all others. Whoever comes to this corner of China will always leave knowing the full measure of the man is to be found here.
The place where his faith never broke under the immense weight it bore.
The place where his memory is imperishable.
The place where, even on the edge of death, the champion ran his last race.
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